Making An Extra 6K For Christmas
People much smarter and more experienced in email marketing told me that Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are not good for sending emails.
The reasons were people are busy with their families, organizing the celebrations, catching up with relatives and finally getting off their phones.
They’re not really interested in buying stuff, plus they spent a lot during Black Friday and on the actual Christmas promotions earlier so products can get delivered by the 25th.
I even heard experts saying it’s safer not to send emails on 24th and 25th to avoid possible spam complaints.
I tried it for a client and the store made an extra $6k those 2 days, from 1 email and 2 follow-ups.
This client usually sends 3 emails per week, earning about $4k from them in 7 days, so this was definitely worth the risk.
Plus we saw no rise in spam complaints at all.
Why Did It Work?
It Was A Good Offer
It Was Sent To The Right Recipients
The pitch was A Fresh Angle (context & copy)
1. Good Offer:
- Instead of the usual X% off on anything and everything, we try to make the value more clear and specific for our readers. We bundle specific products and product lines to present compelling offers to the prospect. We find experimenting with different BOGO combinations, rather than discounts, works best. We found that our target group buys more if they have a clear and specific picture of the offer’s exclusive value. Testing revealed a Buy 2-Get 1 generated the greatest revenue.
2. The Right Recipients:
- Segmentation is its foundation. You can’t just blast your whole list and expect people to stay engaged, let alone for your mail to stay out of the spam folder.
- We took only the recent openers and excluded all the addresses from certain problematic email services that haven’t opened in the last 10-20 days.
3. Fresh Angle (context & copy)
Context:
- For me, an angle means how you present something to a person based on their needs, desires, world views. This is essentially how you think they would present it to themselves.
- We examined the Buy 2 Xs Get 1 X Free offer and thought about how our recipients would sell it to themselves. Why buy 3 pairs of shoes for example?
- It’s Christmas, we get into this giving spirit and like to believe that the generous do get rewarded for their noble actions. And that if you give a gift, you start a gift-giving chain reaction.
Copy:
- So let’s say we angle it as “Hey, buy 2 pairs of these problem-solving shoes (for a specific niche) as gifts for someone, and you’ll get a pair for free!” That almost feels right, but something is missing. It sounds a bit regular and plain; they’ve seen that offer a bunch of times before. We all get curious when something is presented for free, but it also raises our guard a bit. There’s a lot of internet scams and fishy dropshipping offers that give you something for free. It’s even in human nature to doubt those free things and expect you’ll get a surprise request after you take them. Skepticism is natural and healthy to a degree, and we don’t want to go against human nature. Also, if something is free, how good can its quality be?
- I found instead of saying “You’ll get free…,” rephrase it to “I will buy you….” This subtle change made a significant difference in conversion testing.
- So we adapted that angle and decided to add a challenge to our readers. Key: we wrote a plain-text personal email as the store owner. We said in our subject line: “Now Open: An Xmas Bet” with the pre-header “I bet I can prove to you that Christmas spirit is real and….” This leads to us saying that we’ll prove to the customer that the Christmas Spirit is real by continuing that chain of good deeds. Speaking as the store owner, we explained that we will personally buy the recipient a pair of shoes.
This makes it more real. Quality products can’t just be given away so I don’t describe them as free. Plus, we’re actually going to pay for it, as a Christmas gift for the customer who bought two other pairs for the other two people. After that, I spiked emotions with a few picture-painting paragraphs depicting how happy certain people in their life would be to receive this specific, problem-solving product as a gift.
The Result: A Christmas Miracle
Original Email: Open rate of 23.4% & $1,668
Follow-up #1: Open rate of 20.3% & $1,539
Follow-up #2: Open rate of 25.7% & $2,084
Lets talk about how you can make minor changes in email marketing.
